What was your First PC?

My first family computer that i remember was a Packard Bell 386 running MS-DOS. Then we moved up to a 486 with Windows 3.1.

Then, we really moved up. Got an IBM Aptiva, with a Pentium 100, and a CD-ROM!! That was amazing.

My first computer for myself was a Compaq Presario with an AMD K6 450 MHz processor, 15 GB HDD, integrated AGP graphics, Win 98. That's where i started learning how to upgrade my own computer, and over the years it evolved into a whole new machine. Installed my first OS on it (Win XP). The only piece I still use from it is the 3 1/2 floppy drive. Still chugging along after all these years. :)
 
My first real computer was the IBM PC, 4.77mhz (smoking!), 512K ram, dual 5 1/4 drives, 5 meg HD, monochrome monitor with hercules graphics card, 1200 baud modem. My watch has more processing power than that.
 
bvincent said:
My first real computer was the IBM PC, 4.77mhz (smoking!), 512K ram, dual 5 1/4 drives, 5 meg HD, monochrome monitor with hercules graphics card, 1200 baud modem. My watch has more processing power than that.

Got to love the Hercules monochrome graphics :). I had one of those too in the family 8088. It sounds an awful lot like your computer.

The first one I built for myself was a P4 2.53Ghz on an Abit IT7-Max2 Ver. 2. That board was freaking awesome. I wish I would have kept it instead of selling it.
 
My first computer... sigh.

Packard Bell - Intel Pentium 75 MHz
16MB SIMM ram
1GB Hard Drive, 4x CD ROM
Big card that had Sound, 14'4 Modem, and Serial Port
Ran at 640x480 @ 256 Color
Microsoft Windows 95
And it was in one of them old desktop cases where the monitor went ontop

I Cannot beleive that thing would run anything when I look back on it now. MHz in the 2 digits... not ever 100 whole mhz... At the time, i didnt know... i was just like whoohooo a computer. And it did everything I needed it to. Went on AOL and all of that good stuff in 1997.
Those were the days.


Then I got the BEAST! the HP 8490 in 1999 :)
Intel Pentium III 500 whole MHz - Slot 1 Katami Core
128MB of PC100
10GB hard Drive
8MB Ati Rage Pro onboard w/ Voodoo 3 3000AGP
Win 98SE
First Computer with a Cable Connection.

Talk about a WORLD of difference. :)
 
HP pavilion 875 300 mgz "With DVD player" ! was top of the line the day I bought it, DVD's in PC's were just added Paid $2800 bucks and got a free tv, which I still use. Within 4 weeks Processor speed sales went up to 500mgz :mad: I still have it, Its in peices but still here. Man I owned Quake with that machine with my Voodoo 2 card :D
 
HTPC Rookie said:
Me too.

My first: http://oldcomputers.net/altair.html

I learned how to solder on that machine.

I had one too but it was a garage sale buy not my first. All these young'ins......man...you know? No offense to the young'ins but I laugh so hard every time I see some say a 486 or newer was their first that i have to change my Depends.
 
Spectre said:
I had one too but it was a garage sale buy not my first. All these young'ins......man...you know? No offense to the young'ins but I laugh so hard every time I see some say a 486 or newer was their first that i have to change my Depends.

Oh I know what you're saying. I laughed so hard once my teeth fell out!

Damn cheap-ass imitation Poly Grip.....
 
Scroatdog said:
Atari made a computer?? I'm trying to picture it in my head. I personally didn't have one but.......nah, can't picture it. Speaking of Atari, my "predecessors" to my 'state of the art' Commodore 64, from which I ran a BBS site (don't ask), was first: Colecovision, followed by the Atari 2600. Never got the 7200. There was another gaming system out at the time, comporable to the Atari 7200, don't remember who manufactured it, but I didn't have one, and some of my friends did, which made me mad of course. :p

Revealed some age on that one :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

Yeah, like I said before, I was too little to remember much about the system, but the computer was basically integrated into the keyboard. We were "leet" a the time b/c we had 1 MB of ram, which was unheard of at the time. It was my father's computer, but I used to play games and mess around on it. After that, we had a 386, 486 and then a Pentium 90 and so on up.

My Pentium 90 had an 800MB hard drive in it. I remember when I upgraded to a 4.3 GB HD, I couldn't image ever being able to fill that thing up. That is just about when I discovered MP3's.
 
Old School Packard-Bell

Cyrix 200mhz p2 knock-off
40 mb of ram
4 gig HDD
Voodo 2 PCI so i could play sim city 2000
worse 15" monitier you've ever seen

those were the days...........
 
I think it was a kaypro (memory is fuzzy) had a green screen looked like a suitcase played jumpjoe great.
jumpjoe.jpg

^ JumpJoe

Then I had a 386 with the big floppies, played alot of crappy old games that I borrowed from my neighbor, I remember cdman which was a pacman clone and I bought badblood which is a cool rpg like game. (can find it on the net nowadays runs great on modern comps)
 
MrMitch said:
Old School Packard-Bell

Cyrix 200mhz p2 knock-off
40 mb of ram
4 gig HDD
Voodo 2 PCI so i could play sim city 2000
worse 15" monitier you've ever seen

those were the days...........

Err......any day involving a cyrix was a bad day IMHO.
 
Spectre said:
IIRC that was a Trash-80 model...right?

werent those the big box ones? this was a tiny thing looked like just a keyboard... its been too many years. but it could be
 
remember my first PC upgrade, was when Doom came out. I only had like 2 megs or so of memory. Had to go up to 8megs to play Doom. Gosh, seems like last week
 
LordVampyre said:
werent those the big box ones? this was a tiny thing looked like just a keyboard... its been too many years. but it could be

Original Trash-80


I think the color looked very similiar except the new keyboard unit was "sleeker" and said Radioshack TRS-80 Color Computer acroos the top and three colored dot's. Sound right?
 
trash-80 here... withj that big honkin' 4k of memory and cassette storage... then a c64...

do the hp programmable calculators count? hp 58c? i had one of them too...

of course, i also programmed on mainframes that had 4k of addressable memory too... :rolleyes: those were the days when programmers were REAL men... you hadda write TIGHT code then... :D
 
"my" first computer was:

Pentium 90
8MB EDO DRAM
ATI 1MB
Maxtor 850MB HDD
USR Sportster 28.8
4x CDROM

Although I had been bumming CPU time on everything from Apples to Trash80s to C64s to early IBM clones... ;)
 
LOL. I got "my" first computer at 16, for my bday. Compared to the others on this post, it's lightyears ahead.

Alienware Cyborg Green Chenming 601
P4 2.53ghz w/533 fsb
1gb of PC-800(?) ram
80gig hdd
cd/dvd reader
GeForce TI 4600 (great card :D )
SB Live! 5.1
NEC FE2111sb 22" CRT
gianthard keyboard and mouse.
 
packard hell 486sx/25, 4mb ram, 170mb hd, 2x cdrom, 14" monitor, integrated graphics.

i remember my parents paid $1,700 for it...
 
My first computer was an AMIGA- i was too young to remember anything about it other than it did not have a CD rom. It hooked up directly to a TV- no monitor. Maybe these were more like game machines than computers, but they had an operating system that at least looked similar to windows. I definantly did nothing productive on it- only games. Anybody else heard of those things?
 
My first computer wat a intel p3 933mhz 133fsb, with Nvidia TNT2 AGP 32mb (Now changed to a Radeon 9200se 128mb) , 128mb ram, 30 gb HDD, 8x LG dvd burner, Creative Vibra 128 sound card, some intel mobo with 2.1 speakers, bubble jet printer canon BJC-2100SP and a CanoScan N340P scanner.

I got this in 2001, 4 years ago i got it for 2.5k (AU), and it still runs like a beast, not bad for a first computer aye :p , but the comp i got now just owns. ;)
 
LordVampyre said:
remember my first PC upgrade, was when Doom came out. I only had like 2 megs or so of memory. Had to go up to 8megs to play Doom. Gosh, seems like last week

Similar here. My 386 would play Doom like a slideshow, so I had to get a 486 level computer to run it. Games have been pushing my upgrades ever since... :p
 
I can't help but wonder what PCs will be like 20 years from now.

For instance, my youngest (10 years old) has an Athlon XP1900. I wonder if say 20 or even 15 years from now she'll look at me and ask "why did you build me such a piece of junk back then?".

Or even if that far out in time we'll all be laughing at our Opterons and Xeons and saying "I can't believe I used to play on that dinosaur! I was only getting 90FPS back then!"
 
First "Family" PC was my Dad's IBM 5100 the 50 pound luggable (first portable PC). It had this HUGE leather case. Dad had to buy a 2nd plane ticket for it whenever he traveled.

ibm5100.jpg


Taught myself BASIC on this thing in my early teens.

First PC I ever bought, would be the Atari 800XL? (whichever model had the real keyboard instead of the bubble board). Got it right when Atari got out of the PC game and got it cheap at Toy'sR'Us. The single sided single density floppy drive cost nearly as much as the PC. Got some great accessories and games real cheap for it though.

First MS-DOS PC would be a IBM Clone 8088 Turbo XT (Turbo being it clocked up to 10Mhz!), 20meg drive, 2400baud modem, 5.25" floppy and CGA graphics. Bought the PC so I could play Microprose F19 Stealth Fighter, and have been building and upgrading PC's ever since. Between this PC and Que's "Upgrading and Repairing PC's" taught me ALOT on doing my own PC's. This addiction was also helped along by my apartment being above a Mom&Pop PC store, so those last minute upgrades didn't require much travelling.

Yeah I'm old.....
 
First PC I owned:

AST Advantage 6066D
486DX2-66, 8mb RAM, 420mb HD, 2x CD-Rom, 14.4 modem, 1mb VLB Integrated Graphics, 14" Monitor

Got it around the same time the Pentiums hit the market. Would have loved to have bought a pentium based PC, but they were quite expensive at the time. Even so, I got my PC for a little over 2k. Last game I played on that particular system was Duke Nukem 3D, which prompted me to upgrade to 16mb of RAM. Got my 2nd system, which was my very first custom built PC shortly after that.. that was also the first PC I overclocked (166mhz - 200mhz). I remember people telling me how I was going to toast my CPU and that It would never ever be as fast as a "real" Pentium 200mhz... :p
 
My first PC was something like a 286 with a 270mb hd. My father arranged a cool menu system (we didn't have windows) that I could use to start a bunch of games (commander keen and stuff). I still have most of the stuff from that comp on my HD as I've moved everything from computer to computer as I've advanced. This of course means I haven't formatted since 1991-1992 or so.
 
Atari 400 Atari 800xl Atari 1200xl Commodore 128 Amiga 500 8088intel 486sx 66dx 99dx p2 400 a900 a1200 2.4c etc etc etc
 
kaypro 10...flip out black and white (maybe amber mono) i dont remember, 10 mb hdd

sittin in meh garage, i think ill get it out some time
 
Commodore VIC-20. 1 MHz, 5 kilobytes of RAM, no HD, and cassette tapes to store programs :cool:
 
Atari ST, Amiga 500, Radio Shack Trash-80, VIC-20, C64, Tandy 1000RL.

not in any particular order...
 
HTPC Rookie said:
Me too.

My first: http://oldcomputers.net/altair.html

I learned how to solder on that machine.

And I thought I was the only one...

My father brought that beast home for me, in several boxes. It was a Christmas present, along with several college textbooks on Fortran. Got it off someone at his work that bought it, and then didn't ever do anything with it.

His comment? "You like electronics? Have fun, and Merry Christmas."

I was 7 or so at the time. Still remember the smell of solder, dust, and sweat.

Fun times. That was when being a computer enthusiast was right about on par with being a mental patient... :)
 
My first machines were a Nomis and a ZORBA the only difference between them was the size of the amber screen.

The first machine I personally owned was a 386x13 with 8megs of ram and a pair of 40meg harddrives.
 
Good ole Commodore 64, we were rich so we opted for the 1541 floppy drive, not the crappycassette tape drive... haha we still have two of them

LOAD "$", *8
LIST
: )
 
Well if you meant first computer bought with your own money then it would be the one in my sig, but if you mean first comp in the household....It was a 386 with Windows 3.0 although I only used DOS for Rise Of The Triad, Wolfenstein 3d, Dark Forces, and Doom.....Oh and AOL 2.0, lol had it......AOL sucks as much now as they did then, lol.....
 
My first was a commodore 64, with the cassette lol. Spent hours on it.

...Dan
 
ferrisnox said:
Good ole Commodore 64, we were rich so we opted for the 1541 floppy drive, not the crappycassette tape drive... haha we still have two of them

LOAD "$", *8
LIST
: )

REMEMBER: sometimes you need to add the ,1 to that!! LOL :p
 
Tandy 1000, or one of those old brother typewriters that had floppy disk in them..
 
The first one i owned was a 1ghz p3m dell inspiron 8100. The first one i remember using was a 386(i think) that was also my intro into computer gaming :)
 
DiscoStu said:
:eek: My favorite games were Spy Hunter, Oregon Trail, battle chess and lemonade stand.

Ahhh, Lemonade Stand and Oregon Trail! Those I remember well...on My Apple ][c (actually it was a Franklin clone of an ][c before apple but the kibosh on clones, but it ran just like an apple). 2 5.25" floppy drives, GREEN Monochrome monitor, no HD...kids today have no idea the amount of time it took to boot the system off of floppies :p
 
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